Six years ago, I found this film on TV, but the film had already started and progressed to about 10 minutes into the story. I noticed that there was a stellar cast, this was an interesting topic, and I had heard of the book. I ended up buying this DVD to watch the beginning of this film because I had missed the intro section while channel surfing. I sure am glad that I bought it!
This 1946 film starred Tyrone Power as Larry Darrell, Gene Tierney as Isabel Bradley, and Clifton Webb as Elliott Templeton and was shot in black and white.
The film had ridden the same wave of the wildly-successful 1944 book by the same name. With the Tyrone Power ‘triad of actors’ in the lead, its storyline and the dialog interactions amongst these 3 characters (and stars!) were tightly crafted, stunning, and gut wrenching. This is one of the classic films about life, what it is, and what is important.
Another actress in a subplot, Anne Baxter as Sophie MacDonald, dutifully kept up with the main ‘triad’ of stars. Baxter’s portrayal of Sophie, who had a successive series of downfalls in her life, was so poignantly played by Baxter that she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Each of Sophie’s downslides tugged at my heart and Baxter’s acting skills almost made me feel that she was real.
After I had started watching the DVD, especially to see the beginning, I learned that Larry had had a combat jolt in WWI. He had survived an attack, while his friends hadn’t. This was the main driver of the film: Why did Larry survive? What could he do after having experienced this? Seeing the beginning of the film better helped me understand the remainder of the film that I had watched on TV.
Tyrone Powers’ Larry had honesty and gravitas, a great foil to Gene Tierney’s Isabel: flighty, gratingly snobbish, selfish, and materialistic. All of their scenes together were tightly-scripted to show their contrary behaviors beamed back and forth at each other in repartee. Larry’s great seriousness and grit to learn about what life truly should be was played off of Isabel’s opposite behavior. It was mesmerizing to see them both on screen engaging in this type of dialog.
Clifton Webb’s Uncle Elliot was pitched as a higher octave of Isabel’s – another artistic foil to Larry’s persona.
In trying to learn about why he had been spared from death during WWI combat, Larry found himself back in Europe. He then travelled eastward, all the while contemplating how to reach and then later learn life’s secrets from Himalayan masters. After some time there, the masters agreed that he would be allowed to find out these secrets by ascending the mountains. When the journey became arduous, he found a shack near the summit to contemplate, read holy books, and think about the direction that his life should take. When the pre-dawn light started to slip over the horizon, he left the shack, reached the summit and was ‘illuminated’, as was the valley below him.
After having experienced this blinding illumination by ‘spiritual light’, this process changed the perspective of what Larry’s life had to be for him. This means that he had to let some people, activities, and things go, so that he could best carry out the mission for which he had been searching: he learned that the path to enlightenment is as sharp as the razor’s edge.
I had experienced many strong emotions watching this film because there was a lot of tension in the dialog and in the character personalities, some of which were contrary to each other. After I had seen this film, I needed time to digest it and decompress.
Watching this film compelled me to then read the 1944 W. Somerset Maugham book of the same name. The book was even more gut-wrenching, with many more details to make this film clearer. (Please read my Amazon review of this book:
The Razor's Edge
Timing is everything. If I could experience these 2 artistic forms again, I would still start by watching this 1946 film first and then working my way backward to reading the 1944 book by W. Somerset Maugham because the original book is almost always better than the film. If I had read the book first, I would have had interference with the film and might not have liked the film as well as I did. I truly loved both the film and the book.
Today, with our current HD video format and so many vivid and creative ways of filming scenes, I would like to see a re-make of this film, by producing it in multiple sections to create separate films in a series (like the Hobbit/ Lord of the Rings books and films), so that more of the book’s original details could be included.
I thoroughly recommend this film and give it a 5-star rating because of an outstanding script and acting, taut tension throughout many parts of the film, and many superlative scenes. (For even more perspective, please read my 1984 film review of the Razor's Edge:
The Razor's Edge
)
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January 13, 2015 "Please retry" | No enhanced packaging | 1 |
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